Google and Twitter Work Together to Compete with Facebook’s Instant Articles

After Facebook launched its Instant Articles, Google and Twitter are working together on their own. But unlike Facebook’s Instant Articles, or Apple’s News app, Google and Twitter’s collaborated project won’t be a branded product. The plan is currently called ‘accelerated mobile pages’ which is likely to be changed before the launch.

It is strongly speculated that the project will be an open source so that other companies could adopt it as well. It will not host publisher content,but it will show users cached copies of the publishers’ websites. The question of how publishers will be able to monetize the content, is still not clear. Nevertheless, it is poised that retaining the native ads shouldn’t be a problem on this platform.

In July, Twitter updated its summary cards on mobile, both Android and iOS, to show previews of articles within the tweet. The company claimed that the update would enable users on mobile to see the image, title and summary of the tweet in their timelines and that the format was ‘more attractive’ for consuming information.

In May, Google started integrating tweets into its search results on smartphones. The tweets in the mobile search results are grouped into a carousel which users could swipe through to display more tweets. Google had reportedly signed a deal with Twitter in February this year, which would give Google access to Twitter’s tweets.

In May itself, Facebook unveiled Instant Articles, a mobile app feature where news from The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News and German news publishers Spiegel and Bild were displayed.

Similarly, in August, instant messaging app Hike added another feature to itself, thereby becoming a news aggregator as well. Hike claimed that the News feature gathered over a million users within 24 hours of its launch, reports Medianama.